This post covers both the Patient Zero mini-campaign for the 2016 game as well the free so-called Summer bonus episodes for a total of seven extra missions. All these reuse the same locations as the base game of course but they do change up the decor a bit and often depict the same area during a different time of the day. The Summer episodes are essentially more of the same in simpler form even, but the Patient Zero missions do change up the game mechanics a bit.
Unfortunately all of these missions are only bite-sized in both scale and complexity compared with those in the main campaign. Even when set in the bigger maps, the missions themselves only use a small portion of the available area. Similarly each mission only has a single starting point and all of the Patient Zero ones have no set Opportunities at all. I’m particularly annoyed that they often do very little to change up the map from the original missions. For example the Himmapan Hotel is set up as if Jordan Cross and his entourage had just left so their studio setup and roadies are all still there. Various NPCs and their dialogue are still the same so Dexter the Texan is still walking around the GAMA Hospital in Hokkaido etc. It’s disappointing to explore the maps only to find that they’re mostly still the same.
That said, I still enjoy the core gameplay enough that more of the same is fine with me. I loved seeing Sapienza set up as the location for a movie shoot in The Icon and I loved it even more when it hosted a political rally in Landslide. Landslide is probably my favorite of this batch of missions as the target Marco Abiatti has a pretty complex set of behaviors and he interacts with other NPCs as he goes about his rotation in pretty interesting ways. I enjoyed walking about Marrakesh in A House Built on Sand but it’s a bog standard mission otherwise.
In general I found that I didn’t like the Patient Zero missions as much. The complete lack of Opportunities is a little disconcerting at first and made me realize how reliant I had become on them in order to help guide initial exploration of each map. So it’s quite fun to be forced to watch out for routines, openings and useful objects myself. But I soon found that these mission feel even smaller in scale and possibilities than the Summer bonus ones. At the same time the difficulty is increased by having usually quite a large number of people near the targets at almost all times. For example, the second mission has two targets who meet at the graveyard and you can kill one of them to put on his disguise and attend the meeting in his place. However it’s quite difficult to actually make use of that meeting to do a stealth killing and there are guards everywhere.
Two missions in Patient Zero both effectively impose time limit. In the case of one of them you simply have a hard time limit before the two targets meet, one of them hands over a key object and then leave the map. The limit is tight enough to feel quite restrictive. The final mission involves stopping a virus from spreading and each person on the map who becomes infected must also be killed. It’s a novel mechanic but the infection gets out of control very, very quickly and the mission then devolves into a natural kill everything on the map challenge. I suppose that some people may like that but that’s not what I’m looking for in Hitman.
Another mission is a sniping challenge which is completely unlike any other mission. I believe that something similar was released for Hitman Absolution but I didn’t play that standalone mini-game. I quite enjoyed this one and it’s the only mission to use the Colorado map outside of the original campaign. However it is quite short and very easy. I enjoyed playing all these but they’re also much more lightweight than I expected and very far from the intricacy of the original missions. But I definitely will get Hitman 2 once they’ve released all of the episodes and collected them in a single GOTY package.
